THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

PAIN | 2007-02-10

The Puritans may have read and studied Calvin, but technically they were not Calvinists. A more accurate word used by their more sane contemporaries was "Catharist."

ME:

This is my understanding of the situation. Somebody else's theology doesn't interest me except academically, so I'm open to correction:

The Pilgrims were not Puritans. Much of the early history of their tiny Massachusetts Bay Colony was trying to keep from being taking over by Puritan Massachusetts. Thet called themselves Calvinists, too, but not all Calvinists are the same.

Catharists are a whole different kettle of fish. I think you have been lsitenging to people who want to impress you. When such people want to condemn anythig they don't really know about, they use the intellectual-sounding word "Gnostic."

Catharist sounds good, too, but it refers to a form of Manichaeism. The Puritans did not condemn reproduction, which is the essence of Catharism.

IMO.

I am interested in theology because some of the best politics and political argument in history has been funneled into religion. Most of our modern political arguments have appeared in a recognizable form (if you know what you are looking for, which is what I do) as theological debate.

Even an atheist should know his Bible. I don't worship Zeus or Hermes, but I sure as hell know who they are.

COMMENTS (2)

#1 Pain | 2007-02-11 17:48

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Cathar just means "Puritan."

English Reformers and loyalists to Rome actually used the term along with "Precisianist" (in the 39 Articles) and other terms. I am sure they remembered the Albigensian Cathars who fought English knights in France 400 years before and that the comparison was deliberate.

"The Puritans did not condemn reproduction, which is the essence of Catharism."

You are right, the Puritans favored reproduction but not what caused reproduction. The Cathars condemned reproduction but they populated large communities in the south of France. They each were sexually austere, and this leads to the sterility you speak about.

There were many splinter groups that fit under the Puritan umbrella. Most stayed loyal to England, but the Pilgrims abandoned England for Holland before setting sail to the New World.

Are you linking them to their descendants who abandoned the Union for Empire?

#2 Pain | 2007-02-11 18:05

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I forgot to say that the Thomas Cranmer and many other Reformers in the Church of England corresponded with and studied John Calvin. So it may have been right to call Anglicans, Anglican Puritans, and English separatists "Calvinist." But didn't Calvin write about plain church people in both Straburg and Geneva that he had to put up with? The implication is that the English Puritans and Pilgrims were not good Calvinists to ignore, for example, his high-church liturgy. There is also the story that Calvin wrote to Cranmer asking him to ordain him Bishop of Geneva under the apostolic succession (the letter was intercepted soon before Cranmer was martyred). This defeats the notion that Calvin taught a presbyter is different from a priest, a notion important to the Pilgrims.